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Saturday, 23 August 2008

Tutankhamun exhibition

Thanks for the comments and suggestions for my boy's pirate jumper. I'm thinking I might try Kyoko's tubular cast off suggestion to get a bit more stretch - she's written a tutorial here which looks really good.

We're still on holiday here, and this week we had a most exciting excursion into London to see the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition at the O2. I cannot recommend this exhibition enough - it simply blew us all away (maybe with the exception of my 2 year old who was a little young to appreciate it all!). We went as a party of 5 - me, my mum, my husband and the two children.

We were amazed by the quality and quantity of the artefacts on display (no photos allowed, sorry, so I can't share, other than to link to the videos below). My 4 year old daughter has been obsessed with Tutankhamun for some time, since seeing an image on the side of a Sky TV van! She was a prime candidate for a children's audio guide, and just took in all the commentaries on the various items on display, announcing various details with some confidence, much to the amusement of the other adults! We wandered the exhibition for over two hours, with my daughter utterly absorbed, and only the odd complaint from my son, who mainly wanted to talk about Thomas the Tank Engine. For my boy, the highlight was the section which dealt with the archaeologists (or explorers as he called them) and the documentation of their discoveries. We wondered whether it was all going totally over his head until he turned round and pointed to a coffin and announced 'there's dead person in there'!. My girl was more interested in the artefacts themselves and the stories behind them.

The section on Tutankhamun gave an amazing sense of the scale of the tomb. As you entered, a National Geographic animation was playing, showing the arrangement of the multiple shrines, coffins and sarcophogus. I must have stopped to watch this 10 times over as the scale is just breathtaking. You can see the video clip here in the section on King Tut- do go and have a look - it is simply amazing, I really had no idea.

The exhibition was totally overwhelming, and I would really recommend seeing it before it ends on 30th August - it's the first time the artefacts have been brought to Britain since 1972, and who knows when they'll be back.

Wow I found the clip totally mesmerizing. I've been to Egypt (when I was 13) and I've been a pyramid. That was really amazing in itself, but it would have been so incredible if it hadn't been stripped of all of it's movable artifacts.

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